The advent of wireless personal communications devices has revolutionized the telecommunications industry. Cellular, personal communication services (“PCS”), and other services provide wireless personal communication to businesses and individuals at home, in the office, on the road, and at any other location the wireless network can reach. Wireless telephone subscribers no longer must use hard-wired public telephones along the road or wait until returning to the home or office to check messages or to return important business calls. Instead, wireless subscribers can carry out day-to-day business from the privacy of an automobile, from a remote job site, while walking along the airport concourse, and anywhere else that a personal communication signal is accessible.
Thus, it is no surprise that since the introduction of the cellular telephone service, the number of wireless telephone subscribers has increased steadily. Today, there are a staggering number of wireless telephone subscribers whose ranks are growing rapidly. In fact, many households have multiple wireless telephones in addition to their conventional land line services.
With a market of this size, there is fierce competition among hardware manufacturers and service providers. In an attempt to lure customers, most providers offer handsets with desirable features or attributes such as small size, light weight, long battery life, speed dial, and the like. Many recent additions to the marketplace include multi-functional handsets that even provide pocket organizer functions integrated into the wireless handset. Most manufacturers, however, are still scrambling to add new features to their wireless communication devices to share a portion of this booming market.
One way in which new features are added to wireless communication devices is by integrating the devices into the World Wide Web (“Web”). Such integration allows the countless services available through the Web to be extended to wireless communication devices. One such service allows a wireless device to connect to a Web server that provides desirable content from the Web such as stock quotes and sports scores. Additionally, services such as on-line shopping are also becoming widely available to wireless consumers.
Typically, the delivery of such content and services is achieved through a text based interface presented on the display of the wireless communication device. This type of interface is generally necessary to optimize the often meager resources of a wireless device. For example, wireless devices are challenged with their minimal display size, limited processing power, limited memory, limited ability to display complex graphics and colors, and limited bandwidth.
A significant drawback related to the minimal display size of a wireless communication device is encountered when large amounts of information need to be presented. Typically, the information is divided up into portions that can be simultaneously presented on the small display of the wireless device. This type of division requires the use of a considerable number of separate screens to present any large body of information. A single screen of information is typically referred to as a “card” while a “deck” usually refers to a collection of cards.
Furthermore, the selection of an option on each card in order to more narrowly define the scope of information being sought results in very inefficient navigation when incorrect choices are mistakenly selected. Interacting with a deck containing a large number of cards (each with several options and selections) can be extremely cumbersome and very confusing. Thus, these conventional systems can significantly limit the commercial advantages related to the wireless delivery of content and services. Accordingly, what is needed is a system and method that overcomes the significant problems of the conventional wireless card and deck navigational systems as described above.